In a world where any vendor's storage system can be managed by a
single technology, the company that owns that technology is king,
say storage analysts.
EMC recently outlined such a world, where commodity storage
equipment, plentiful bandwidth, and improved storage virtualisation
tools all converge to foster the creation of "information plants"
made up of massive, heterogeneous storage networks.
EMC wants to be the company that manages these information plants -
expected in or around 2005 - and is making huge investments in
interoperability research to meet the challenge, according to
officials.
"It is essential that higher levels of functionality are delivered"
to accomplish such a complex goal, explained Jim Rothnie, senior
vice president and CTO of EMC.
Built on the shoulders of existing EMC storage management software
such as ESN Manager, information plant technology is already being
tested at more than 1,000 EMC customer locations worldwide,
officials said.
Sources close to EMC said the company is also proactively tuning
its storage platform to work with third-party storage products in
an effort to bring equipment from non-allied storage vendors, such
as Sun Microsystems, under the information plant management
umbrella.
"This is the first real sign that says EMC is sticking their toe in
the water [towards] becoming an independent software company," said
Steve DuPlessie, a senior analyst at Enterprise Storage
Group.
The motivation for EMC to transform itself into a software company
lies with storage virtualisation, a relatively new technique that
in its purest form allows network administrators to add storage
using generic, commodity disc drives in place of brand-name
gear.
Offering pure virtualisation effectively kills the market for a
storage vendor's own branded storage gear. Vendors must either
offer limited virtualisation on their own branded products or seek
revenue from their own virtual storage management products,
DuPlessie said.
"That's the thing that most scares EMC about virtualisation.
They'll either commoditise themselves, or someone else will do it
to them," DuPlessie said.
EMC is betting that its accelerated software management strategy
will eventually put information plant technology in the position of
managing storage devices from competitors such as IBM, Hitachi, and
Hewlett-Packard, companies Rothnie believes are still focused
primarily on hardware. Thus, competitors may be less capable of
moving up the chain of higher functionality, he added.
A shift in focus from hardware to storage management software will
also put EMC in contention with storage software company Veritas
Software. EMC claims to have a 25% share of the current storage
software market already.
"Every successful, large company has to decide to milk its product
cash cow until it's out or slowly cannibalise its expertise and
morph into something else. The idea of owning all the storage in
the world is never going to happen and EMC realises this,"
explained Dan Tanner, a senior analyst at Aberdeen Group.
But Tanner does not expect EMC to abandon its storage hardware
business in the near future. In fact, a potential scenario could be
for EMC to "set up virtualisation so you can mirror some other
company's storage to [EMC's] Summetrix, but you can't mirror it
back. Then it becomes a migration strategy," Tanner said.
DuPlessie said EMC's sheer size gives it the advantage. "There
aren't many $2bn [£1.4bn] software companies out there. If EMC
becomes a software company that covers all, it's not like Sun has a
choice. Sun will adhere to [EMC's] framework," DuPlessie said.